


The Other Coup

by Alley_Skywalker



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF, Екатерина | Catherine (TV 2014)
Genre: Backstory, Coup d'état, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 05:50:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7210505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alley_Skywalker/pseuds/Alley_Skywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"My aunt fears a coup d'etat," Pyotr Fyodorovich told everyone who would listen. He wasn't wrong. Elizabeth knew all too well about coups.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Other Coup

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avani/gifts).



Elizabeth hadn’t always wanted to rule. She had not been raised to expect the crown and, truthfully, she had been perfectly happy to live out her days in gaiety and sunlight. There had been a time when she considered that she would be quite happy to simply marry well, have a child and live comfortably with her small court of friends and acquaintances surrounding her – always near power but never quite at its epicenter. 

But, slowly, piece by piece, they had taken everything from her. Her beautiful sister, Anna, her darling half-nephew Petrusha, Sasha Buturlin, even Karl August, the most promising and dashing of her suitors. 

Death and distance were Elizabeth’s worst enemies. 

Karl August might have not been her first love, but he was the first man she had thought of making her own. She had dreamed, young and foolish, that he would make her wife and mother, that that was her lot. And when they danced the minuet, Elizabeth had felt content with that. But just before their wedding, he had suddenly collapsed into her arms never to awaken again. That would be Elizabeth’s last haunting memory on her deathbed – the blank look in her fiancé’s eyes as he collapsed and the dreadful premonition that his death marked the end of her girlish peace. 

Nor would Elizabeth ever forget saying goodbye to Anna on the docks, the ship masts towering behind her as the salty wind whipped through the skirts of her dress, ballooning them outward. Anna had stood with one hand resting on her stomach, a position that had become most natural for her as her pregnancy progressed, and the other holding onto her sister’s hand. “Remember,” Anna had said, “You are Peter the Great’s daughter. No one can take that from you.” Elizabeth had been young them, too young, she felt sometimes, to be left all alone with both her parents and her sister torn away from her. News of Anna’s death came almost simultaneously with the news of her nephew’s birth a few months later. It was the last time Elizabeth allowed strangers to see her cry. 

Sasha Buturlin had been a blessing from the moment he stepped into her life. Her first love, her first lover. But Petrusha, God rest his soul, had loved her a little too fervently for his twelve-fourteen years and had sent Sasha away on the advice of Ivan Dolgoruky. Buturlin would return to her later, but by then it would be too late for them. 

As for Petrusha… Well. How odd it was that both her nephews bore the same name. They were even alike in temperament. But her half-nephew had loved her while Anna’s boy only resented her and she never managed to figure out how to change that. Petrusha had gone from her quietly, in illness – of smallpox, in fact. And it was his face she would think of when, many years later, Razumovsky would come to tell that her that her heir – Anna’s boy, that other Petrusha in her life – had fallen ill with smallpox. 

After they buried her half-nephew, Elizabeth realized she was all alone. What friends she had she could easily loose. A new regime was coming, a new way of things. She was no one in this new tide and every day threatened to swamp her, send her headfirst underwater. Others, who felt the same, turned to her for guidance, leadership, protection. All the things that she felt not quite capable of giving them, though she thought it must be her responsibility to do just that. 

The courted the favor of the guards – danced at their balls, christened their children, laughed and spent what coin she had liberally on dresses and favors and vodka. She led naturally, almost unthinkingly. Men followed her strength of character, her fiery passion even though she was no great statesman and had, during the reign of Anna Ivanovna, very little actual power. But she was Russian to the core, Peter the Great’s own daughter. The people loved her and, perhaps far more importantly, so did the guards. 

Her friends began to plot long before she did. Lestocq and Alexander Shuvalov worked with little to no encouragement from her. When Anna Ivanovna died and first Biron then Anna Leopoldovna became regent to the infant emperor Ivan VI, Elizabeth began to heed their words and their urgings. She wasn’t certain what had suddenly moved her to change her passive stance. Perhaps she had grown up, thrown away completely the dreams of her youth. Perhaps she had begun to believe the popular fear-mongering of “foreigners” taking over the country and feared that along with all the people she loved she might lose her country as well. But this time, when her councilors spoke, she listened. 

Coups, unlike revolutions, are intimate, clandestine things, concocted in dark rooms in hushed voices among a trusted inner circle. Coups are private sitting rooms with only three candles lit by the window, suffocating with tension and anticipation. They are the sharp knock on a door in the late hours of the evening and the paleness of two guardsmen who have come to say “it’s now or never, Your Highness.” Coups are the feeling of dread as fresh snow falls on the ground and a young woman kneels to pray. Elizabeth would always live in fear of a coup, because she had come to power by one – her predecessors and their councilors, the brilliant Osterman himself, had missed the signs, there was no reason to think her people wouldn’t either. 

In the first hours after midnight, Elizabeth knelt to pray before the icon of the Virgin Mary. A single, flickering candle threw long shadows into the corners of the room. Her words came in breathy whispers, halting and strangled as she prayed for the fortitude and courage to not abandon what she had begun. And in exchange she made a vow – to never execute anyone during her reign, no matter their crimes. There would be no deaths at her hand, she swore. 

The creek of the door opening carefully announced Razumovsky, who slipped into the room like a shadow and settled by the door in his usual, steady silence. Elizabeth could feel his eyes on her neck and she shivered, realizing that his life was in her hands now more than it ever had been. “What do you say, Alyosha? Will it work?”

“Of course it will, Your Highness.” He continued as she stood, slowly. “You are Peter the Great’s daughter.” 

Elizabeth allowed herself a small, sardonic smile. “That is what Anna said, before she left.” 

“It is the truth.” 

_But will it be enough?_ She walked over to him and twined their hands together. She heard voices in the next room as the rest of her intimates prepared to set out for the guards’ barracks. Elizabeth breathed in deeply. Razumovsky bowed his head to kiss her forehead and temple, deliberate, slow kisses, forcing her to relax. Her second love was nothing like Sasha Buturlin. Sasha had been fire and blizzard and torrential rain. Her Alyosha was the rock against which she could break her waves before they swept her and others up and carried them away into destruction. He was and always would be her fortitude when she was lacking it. Perhaps that was why she never abandoned him, even when she was able to return Sasha to her court. 

“It’s time,” Elizabeth said finally, untangling herself from her lover and sweeping into the front room with as much authority as she could muster. 

They made their way to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky regiment in the dark. Elizabeth walked into a crowded room and was instantly surrounded by officers and soldiers alike. Being among them was almost like being home – she was their leader and they would follow her. “Lads!” she said, as silence fell over the room, only the low hooting of the wind, coming from cracks in the windows, dared interrupt her. ‘You know whose daughter I am. Follow me!”

“We shall! We will kill them all!” 

Elizabeth shook her head, remembering her vow. “No, I shan’t go with you if that is what you intend. I take all of these foreigners under my special protection.” She looked around, daring the crowd of soldiers, which now hummed and buzzed with sudden uncertainly and frustration, to challenge her. She took the cross from around her neck and held it up, sinking to her knees before them. “I swear to die for you. Do you swear to die for me?”

“We swear!” 

They were still hers, even if she denied them their petty vengeances. If that was not proof enough that she had won them over long ago, nothing was. 

The rest of that night remained in her memory in hot, dream-like flashes: the crunch of fresh snow under a hundred solders’ boots, the sting of frosty winter air against her face, the faceless watchmen at the palace who stood aside at their approach instead of resisting as was their duty, the empty echoes in the deserted palace hallways. But clearest of all, she would remember the calm look on Anna Leopoldovna’s sleeping face when they entered her bedchamber and the warmth of her skin under Elizabeth’s palm on her forehead. “It’s time to wake up, sister.” 

Those were the last words that were completely her own – all the rest would be with the weight of Russia at her back and on her shoulders.


End file.
